For ecommerce businesses, appealing offers, high-quality products, or brand recognition might not be enough for converting leads if user-experience is left behind.

In the digital world, store website performance plays an essential role in the user experience, directly impacting sales conversion rate, user session time, among other important metrics.

Every millisecond counts and affects not only the consumer decision-making process but also the store website rank in search engine results.

Thus, to help you ensure the success of your online presence, this article introduces a few practices you can implement to optimize store performance and, consequently, improve customer experience.

Some actions that can boost store website performance can be enabled in the Admin of your store under Store Settings > Storefront > Store > Advanced.

These features are described and explained in the Enabling store settings section.

Additional actions are detailed in the Manual optimizations section.

For implementation details, read our documentation on how to safely enable performance settings in your store.

These practices can improve SEO by up to 80% and page loading time by over 50%. This data can be identified with leading website performance analysis tools, such as Google Lighthouse and Google Analytics.

The orderForm is an object that stores and fetches data from a user order, including each item added to the cart.

To give other Store Theme blocks access to the data stored in the orderForm and, consequently, allow them to render it, Store Framework runs the OrderFormProvider object in each store page. This object is exports all the necessary orderForm data to these blocks.

However, all stores using VTEX IO Store Framework currently have two OrderFormProviders: a legacy one, still consumed by native blocks such as minicart and buy-button, and a newer version, which is better suited to replace it.

As a result, we recommend that the stores that already use the new minicart.v2 and add-to-cart-button blocks (instead of minicart and buy-button, respectively) discontinue OrderFormProvider legacy. By consuming from a single provider, you will notice performance improvements in your store.

More details on how to implement this optimization can be found in the documentation on Enabling OrderForm optimization.

The VTEX IO platform provides a native service worker to every store that uses Store Framework. However, since a website can only run one service worker at a time, you may face conflicts when working with a third-party service that provides its own service worker.

You can deactivate the native service worker provided by VTEX IO to successfully use a third-party solution in your store.

For more information, read our documentation on Deactivating the VTEX IO native service worker.

The content which a user first sees when opening a web page is known as above-the-fold content. This part of the page can also be called critical because it needs to be loaded quickly to provide a better user experience.

In other words, the critical part of the page must be rendered correctly and promptly before anything else.

However, by default, the browser initiates the rendering of a web page after it has finished loading, parsing, and executing all related CSS files. Consequently, the more extensive the CSS code, the greater the time required to render the critical part of the page.

To address this problem, you can enable critical CSS optimization on home pages. This feature allows the browser to identify the essential CSS code blocks required to display the critical part of the page and load the remaining CSS code asynchronously.

Keep in mind that by enabling this option, you might notice some style inconsistencies in the store layout. Test it with caution before enabling it on a production workspace. Also, if you notice any side-effects on the store website, please open a ticket and let us know!

To correctly display a web page layout, the browser needs to make multiple HTTP requests to download each CSS file. However, numerous requests might increase the time to render a single web page.

VTEX IO can avoid various download requests by concatenating multiple CSS files in one.

Note that by combining CSS in a single file, the browser makes fewer requests and loads web pages faster, improving the performance of your ecommerce website.

Before displaying a web page, the VTEX IO service app responsible for server-side rendering (Render Runtime) interprets the page metadata script. You can see an example of this script below.

<script>
        __RUNTIME__ = {"account":"vtexstore","amp":false,"bindingChanged":false,"binding":{"id":"aacb04t3-a8fa-4bab-b5bd-2d654d20dcd8","canonicalBaseAddress":"vtexstore.vtex.com"},"culture":{"availableLocales":[],"country":"USA","currency":"USD","language":"en","locale":"en-US","customCurrencyDecimalDigits":null,"customCurrencySymbol":"$"},"production":true,"query":{},"settings":{....

Note that this script holds a lot of important data about a web page, and it can be long, characterizing a long task for the browser.

Therefore, when lazy runtime is enabled, this script is broken into smaller ones in order to prevent the total blocking time of the store website from being compromised.

This way, long tasks will be avoided, and you will reap the benefit of a faster store.

Some apps might not work as expected when you enable this option. Test it with caution, and analyze the effects on different website pages before enabling it on a production workspace. Also, if you notice any side-effects on your store, please open a ticket and let us know!

When you enable this option, menus containing submenus will benefit from automatically enabling the experimentalOptimizeRendering prop. This configuration prevents a whole chain of submenus from being loaded unnecessarily.

submenus will be loaded only if the user interacts with the parent menu (in which the prop was configured).

Google will not be able to track the hidden submenu items for SEO purposes, since their content will only be loaded with user interaction. Therefore, ensure your SEO strategy is already covered with the store sitemap or the store's first meaningfully painted content.

If you enable this option, the scrollable facet box and search results pages will be lazily rendered.

The content inside the user viewport will be initially loaded for rendering. On the other hand, content outside the user viewport will be loaded only during scrolling.

If you enable this option, you might notice unexpected behaviors, such as gaps while scrolling. If you experience any side-effects on your website pages, please open a ticket and let us know!

This option improves the performance of search pages by partially fetching the total number of available facets.

Once this option is enabled, users on the search results page will see a maximum of 10 facets per filter. The remaining facets, if any, will not be automatically fetched by the search query nor displayed to the end user.

Instead, a Show more button will be displayed below the rendered facets, allowing users to fetch the remaining ones.

Remember: A facet is the filer value. For example: Color is a filter, and the value Blue is a facet of that filter.

We recommend using the __fold__ block in scrollable pages.

With this block, you can specify which interface components will be initially loaded for rendering and which ones will be loaded during user scrolling.

This way, only the first visible blocks will be loaded, and the ones "below the fold" will be lazy-loaded during scrolling.

In addition, use the __fold__.experimentalLazyAssets block to indicate which theme blocks must be loaded statically when the first user interface interaction occurs.

Check this link to learn more about Fold blocks.

If any of these blocks cause any side-effects on your website pages, please open a ticket and let us know!

In scenarios in which a Menu block does not contain submenus declared within itself, we recommend that you change its configuration to use menu-item blocks as props.

For instance, in the example below, the main menu-items (Apparel & Accessories, Home & Decor, and More) cannot have their implementation changed. They must remain as children since they have a trigger to open a submenu.

However, the internal menu-items (Clothing, Accessories, and Eyeglasses) can have their implementation changed from children to props.

Note that every menu-item was previously configured as a children/block. With the change, the menu-items group declared as props are interpreted as a single block (blue square).

This way, the number of blocks is reduced from 3 to 1.

Learn more about how to apply both configurations in the Menu documentation.

The size of the images displayed in your store can directly impact overall performance. To optimize image rendering in your website, we recommend that you adopt the practices detailed in Best practices for rendering images regarding the media type used in your theme.

Check this link to learn more about the best practices for rendering images.

If the search results page is flooded with product information, performance problems can arise when loading or rendering its data.

Fortunately, this can be changed with two props, namely skusFilter and simulationBehavior.

These props control the SKUs returned for each product in the search query and define whether the displayed search data will be up-to-date (skusFilter) or fetched using the cache (simulationBehavior).

We recommend that you only allow the first available SKU to be returned for each product (using the FIRST_AVAILABLE value in the skusFilter prop) and use cache to display the search data (using the skip value in the simulationBehavior prop).

Learn more about how to properly configure this in the Search Results app documentation.

We recommend you build your theme shelf and carousel blocks using Slider Layout.

Slider Layout natively lazy loads the rendered images or product information. That means that the information in a shelf or carousel built with Slider will only be loaded when components receive user interaction, decreasing the website page load time.

However, keep in mind that the more products your shelf or carousel has, the more greater the impact on website performance will be.

You can find more details on how to use Slider Layout when configuring these two blocks by reading the Shelf documentation and the recipe on Building a Carousel using Slider Layout.